Binda and Colli, Thirty Years of Italian and Spanish Big Business

The first issue of the top-field journal Business History for 2011 presents the results of an ongoing international project on large European corporations, the purpose of which is to map large firms in terms of strategy, structure, ownership and performance. The project, which involves several research groups in various European countries, is led by Andrea Colli (Department of Institutional Analysis and Public Management), Abe de Jong (Erasmus University, Rotterdam) and Martin Iversen (Copenhagen Business School).

With the publication of Whittington and Mayer'sbook on the European Corporation (Oxford University Press, 2000) many new insights into the strategies, structures and ownership of large companies in the UK, Germany and France were added to a literature which began in the 1970s at Harvard. Many relevant research questions are however still unanswered. The Mapping Corporate Europe project aims to expand the original work of Whittington and Mayer in several directions, including (i) a chronological analysis covering 50 years, starting with the Rome treaty in 1957; (ii) geographical extension including smaller countries and both Western and Eastern European countries; (iii) firms from other industries in addition to manufacturing companies and (iv) attention to the internationalization of European firms. These analyses will form the basis of a rich description of the developments of large European corporations over the past five decades, using both qualitative and quantitative approaches.

The articles published in the special issue are based upon datasets built on a national base on a framework allowing their subsequent merger into a unique dataset, managed by the research group. The datasets are a comprehensive analysis of the first 50 business groups and corporations, for which detailed data have been collected from original sources, archives and directories. The result is a considerable amount of information analyzing in detail ownership structures, strategies and policies, corporate architectures, providing also performance indicators. The historical perspectiveadopted (data has been collected, when possible, since the early 1960s), allows to develop longitudinal studies.

Changing Big Business in Italy and Spain, 1973-2003: Strategic Responses to a New Context (pages 14-39, doi: 10.1080/00076791.2011.546658), the article jointly written by Veronica Binda (Pompeu Fabra and Università Bocconi) and Andrea Colli draws a comparison of the evolution in the strategies, organizational structures, ownership patterns of the top 50 Italian and Spanish business groups and the relationships between these three dimensions in the period extending from the mid-1970s to 2003. Despite the deep changes in the macroeconomic framework during the period considered, the ownership and organizational structures of big business present relevant continuities in both countries. However, the database individuates a metamorphosis in the diversification and internationalization patterns in both nations. Among the many relevant factors in the interpretation of this trend, the impact of the process of European integration and the high level of turbulence which characterized the largest companies during this period are not negligible.

The article, and the project as a whole, is the first attempt to provide a systematic analysis of the evolution of the large corporations during the process of European integration, and provides rich longitudinal evidence as a basis for further developments.